The proposed abolition of Local Education Authorities is so beautifully ignorant that it would be charming, if these people were not in government.
I have known Jonathan Simons for nearly 20 years, and his only qualification to redesign the country's entire system of schooling is that he is a socially well-connected Conservative Party activist in London. Back in the day, we all thought that he was just a minor public school oaf.
On which note, it was of course Tony Blair who started all of this, with his Academies, his cutting of LEA governors (unlike Simons, I did not have to set up my own school in order to get a place on a Governing Body, and I had two before I had left university), his restriction of Foundation governorships to parents, and all of the rest of his measures to remove schools from the public realm.
Oh, well, so much for the National Curriculum that the Conservatives fought so hard to impose on other people's children's schools, but not on those attended by their own children.
But the end of the National Pay Scale for teachers will be the end of National Pay Agreements for everyone, devastating public service recruitment across much of country, and making it easier to pay women less, as the weakening of the collective bargaining power of trade unions also always does.
As an aside, if anyone ever did want to bring back the selective system of secondary education, then that would now be absolutely impossible, since the LEAs were vitally and intimately necessary to its management. How could they not have been? How could they not be? Where it remains, they still are.
Moreover, with Labour and the Conservatives now tied in the polls, it is extraordinary that the latter still assume that they are going to be in office forever. They are proposing to concentrate vast power in the hands of a future Labour Education Secretary who will be no Blairite.
As for the current excuse for an Education Secretary, even this is being announced by someone else. That sorry fact says all that needs to be said about her.
After many years a governor starting barely after you had left, the Labour party through the LEA removed you even though the school wanted to keep you. But you carried on going to productions and things, now you even turn up at all the old guard's funerals. Lucky for you your local academy is run by the diocese and you now write for the diocesan newspaper. You never really left and you'll be back soon enough because it is no longer anything to do with local elected representatives.
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